Japanese Top Search Keywords 2009 By Yahoo! Japan

Although it is November, the season of 2009 ranking comes! Yahoo! Japan discloses their annual ranking by what keywords people searched in this year. As always, all Japanese search engines and portals will follow, but Yahoo! Japan is the No.1 search in Japan, this ranking is one of the best to describe “regular” people’s search… Continue reading Japanese Top Search Keywords 2009 By Yahoo! Japan

Yahoo! Japan To Shut Down Email Newsletter Service

Whilst US Yahoo! dumps their free web hosting service Geocities with huge number of pages painfully, semi-independent and more successful sibling Yahoo! Japan also decides and announces their a bit old-fashioned service, Yahoo! Merumaga next April. Merumaga is abbreviation of “Mail Magazine”, which means email newsletter in Japan (the word “Nyu-su Reta-“=”newsletter” is also understandable… Continue reading Yahoo! Japan To Shut Down Email Newsletter Service

See You, CU

Even Japan’s Web Colossus Yahoo! Japan can easily fail if trying to force real name to Japanese users. The social business networking service Yahoo! CU, which launched November 2008 is announced to cease on October 19th, before its first anniversary. CU encourages users to register their real name and organization name which they belong, to… Continue reading See You, CU

Mixi Finally Shed ‘Beta’ With Mixi Appli

Mixi [J] (Asiajin articles), the biggest social network service in Japan, starts their OpenSocial compliant application platform Mixi Appli officially opened to every Mixi user on PC. Mixi Appli Mobile is planned to follow next month. Mixi announced its OpenSocial platform last year and has been running closed beta test with third party developers for… Continue reading Mixi Finally Shed ‘Beta’ With Mixi Appli

Rakuten To Start P2P Online Political Donations For The First Time In Japan

Rakuten, one of Japan’s e-commerce giants, announced it would start a service enlightening voters on political participation in late July. The website accepts credit cards to donate your money to politicians whom you support. In the previous U.S. presidential election last year, Barack Obama carried a large amount of money from individual fundraisers on the… Continue reading Rakuten To Start P2P Online Political Donations For The First Time In Japan

Election And Internet In Japan

Agile Media Network held a conference “Internet Changes Election?” [JP] on April 24th. Statesmen and NPOs discussed about the use of Internet for election in Japan. Shin Itoh of Japan Initiative [JP] gave a 30-minutes talk on Japanese Election Law. He said that the law is unreasonably strict. Electoral campaign is only allowed during official… Continue reading Election And Internet In Japan

Monetize Hacks #3 Report (part 1)

24th night at Roppongi Hills, the third Monetize Hacks meeting was held by some web directors from Livedoor and Hatena by welcoming 120 web directors and entrepreneurs in and around Tokyo. The first monetize Hacks [J] was called for web directors greeting and exchanging ideas around 15 people, the second one [J] was a group… Continue reading Monetize Hacks #3 Report (part 1)

Yahoo! Japan Launches TV Version Site

“Terebi-ban (TV version) Yahoo! Japan” is a new variation of Yahoo! Japan for home TV browsers. Left side-bar menu has only 7 items, news, weather, sports, astrology, TV programme, cooking recipe and Chiebukuro (Yahoo! Answers Japanese version). The content is only 8 news headlines, 1 news with photo and 2 hot keywords. It is so… Continue reading Yahoo! Japan Launches TV Version Site

Two Broadband Video Streaming Sites To Be Merged To Survive

   Yahoo Japan[J] announced Tuesday it would buy 51% stake in Gyao[J] which is the free broadband video streaming service and has been wholly owned by Japan’s largest cable music broadcaster USEN.   Yahoo Japan will buy Gyao’s 4,998 shares for USD5.3M, and merge Gyao and Yahoo Douga (Yahoo Japan’s free video streaming service) together this… Continue reading Two Broadband Video Streaming Sites To Be Merged To Survive